Ion Tanasescu

The article analyses the psychological aspects of “phantasy presentation” in Brentano’s lecture Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik dated 1885/1886. It focuses primarily on two major aspects of Brentano’s work: (1) the traditional understanding of phantasy presentation as intuitive presentation, and as fundamentally related to the perceptual presentation; (2) Brentano’s conception according to which phantasy presentations are “concepts with intuitive nucleus”. In this context, the text focuses on the following topics: the relation between the inauthentic presentations of the phantasy and perceptual presentations; the relation between presentations with attributive unity and surrogate presentations in logic; and the relation between the intuitive and conceptual element in the constitution of phantasy presentations. The study argues that, despite the title of the lecture—Ausgewählte Fragen aus Psychologie und Ästhetik—Brentano’s analysis of phantasy presentation does not refer to the aesthetic function, but to the psychological function of this presentation. Furthermore, it argues that the psychological aspect of phantasy presentation represents one of the main aspects of Brentano’s work, subsequently used by Husserl in his studies to underline the differences between the perceptual and phantasy presentation.

The study argues against the thesis that, in his first writing, Franz Brentano neglected the role of truth-makers in Aristotle’s theory of truth. It reveals textual evidence that proves the importance of truth-makers in Brentano’s analysis of the Aristotelian correspondence theory of truth in his 1862 doctoral dissertation. It also supports the idea that Brentano’s deduction of Aristotle’s categories in that work is based on the central tenet of Aristotle’s theory of truth, i.e., the agreement between judgment and thing.